Quotes from Pascal Boyer

I do not think that people have religion because they relax their usually strict criteria for evidence and accept extraordinary claims; I think they are led to relax these criteria because some extraordinary claims have become quite plausible to them.

Coalitional dynamics would predict that whatever outsiders do is often little concern to fundamentalists. What matters is what other members of the group are likely to do.

The fact that early humans did decorate corpses, lay out the bodies in particular postures or bury people with flowers, aligned horns or tools would support the notion that some ritualization of death is a very ancient human activity.

That we have evolved capacities for social interaction means that we tend to represent morality and misfortune in a very special way, which makes the connection with supernatural agents extremely easy and apparently obvious.

Humans were designed by evolution to live in societies, but they may not understand how societies work.

Experiments show that even three-year-olds have the intuition that rewards should be proportional to contributions, in places as different as Japanese cities and the camps of Turkana nomads in Kenya. Obviously, it does happen that people take more than their share-but that is universally considered exploitative, and people are eager to avoid or shun individuals who do that.